The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
S1E10 - Your Printer Hates You. And Now It Can Build Things
Printers used to be the villains of the office...loud, cranky, and prone to eating your best work right before a deadline. But somewhere between the screech of a dot matrix and the hiss of a resin vat, something changed. Printing got interesting. Really interesting.
In this episode, we trace the unlikely glow-up of one of tech’s most unloved inventions. From the early days of line feeds and perforated paper to the high-precision world of additive manufacturing, we explore how the humble printer became a platform for creation.
Renee and Marc dive into the science, the utility, and the sheer weirdness of turning digital files into physical objects. Along the way, they ask: when a printer can make a jet engine, a human ear, or a house, is it even a printer anymore? Or has “printing” quietly become the most transformative technology of them all?
Because somewhere between ink and imagination, the printer stopped copying—and started inventing. One layer, one atom, one organ at a time.
Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.
email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Nostalgic Nerds podcast, where we explore how technology has evolved over the years from the old school
Renee:gadgets we once relied on to the cutting edge tech shaping our future. I'm Renee, and I am with my co-host, Marc.
Marc:Marc, that's me.
Renee:Yeah, and that way they know whose voice is who.
Marc:They may not pick up on that, right?
Renee:And today, we're diving into the fascinating journey from the deafening clatter of dot matrix printers to the near silent magic of modern 3D printing. This is the story of how additive manufacturing flipped the entire idea of printing onto its head, transforming everything from home offices to heavy industry. Trust me, this is one that's going to be an eye opener. So let's rewind the clock and see how we got from here to there. So let's set the scene, Marc. It's 1980. It's one of the largest, most iconic printers of all time, the dot matrix printer. If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, you know exactly what I mean. That sound, the rapid fire clack, it was like.
Marc:Oh, man. So annoying.
Renee:Right. And it was so loud that machine was usually in its own room and it had its own case that you would put down over top of it. So you didn't have to listen to it from either like in the room or outside it. It probably was deafening. It might be one of the reasons I have bad hearing.
Marc:It might be. Do you remember these big giant matrix farms? Did KDA have a farm in the building?
Renee:We did not. Pittsburgh might have. We didn't have one.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. Because they would –
Renee:Pittsburgh would print out all the financial reports and they would be like this thick on – two inches thick on dot – Marc can see me. No one else can. Two inches thick dot – and it would be the GL. Like it's just a general ledger to see like the budget stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone was doing that. But like the LA office wasn't doing that for sure.
Marc:Yeah, I definitely was in some of the farms. Like at First Data, we had a farm because they were pin printing, you know, the mailers. You had to mail out the pins when you're, you know, for your card. Oh. Right, what's my four-digit pin? Yeah. And those things were always running just constantly. You had to wear earphones, you know, earplugs to go into that place. It was just so loud all the time.
Renee:Oh, I can't believe, yeah. Well, the sound of that rapid fire clack of pins and inked ribbon, it was basically the printer version of a jackhammer. Right? That noise could double as an alarm clock. It really... Even the ones you had at home that would be sitting next to your home PCs. Like, you couldn't kick it off after 11 o'clock or your parents would yell at you.
Marc:It was just so loud. Yeah, you can't get up early at 4 o'clock in the morning and do your homework and print it out.
Renee:Nope, you cannot. These printers worked by slamming tiny pins into a ribbon, leaving behind little dots that formed letters or images. The result? Faintly fuzzy text and graphics, yeah, but back then it felt futuristic. Business loved them because they were cheap, rugged, and perfect for invoices, shipping labels, paychecks, anything like that, that they need to look pretty. And Marc, the prettier it looked, the more those little pins had to work, and the longer it took to print it, but then the louder it was too, because it was working way harder on making Times New Roman look truly like Times New Roman.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, they're like little needles, basically, you know, and they shoot and they hit the hit the ink, you know, the ribbon and then just a micro shift of the head and then it shoots another needle and it gets like little tiny, tiny, tiny little dots. Yeah, I worked on lots of dot matrix.
Renee:It's like it's like impressionist print, impressionist art. The farther away you get, the more it looks normal. But if you're up really, really close, it's just a bunch of crap, right? You can see it. That's not my best to me.
Marc:Remember, like, yeah, draft mode on these would, you know, would just run through as fast as possible. And it was like, couldn't really read it. It was kind of, and remember the paper? Do you remember the, like, the really wide paper with the little circles on the edge, the perforated things you tear off?
Renee:Yeah, because it was feeding through gears, right? It was, the gears what was moving the paper. And that was, that's what was making, because every pass is just one line, right? So the tops of all the T's go first, and then the second part of the T's go second. And it's for the whole sentence.
Marc:Right? The I.
Renee:The I, yeah. And by the time you get to the bottom of that line, you've done probably 13 or 14 passes to make that one sentence. It's so much, I don't know why that was better than typewriter, but here we are, right? And you're right. And those perforated things, you would have to tear them off. And nine times out of ten, you tore your paper. So now you've got a half torn paper you have to turn in because you had crappy dot matrix printers paper.
Marc:Yes. Do you remember the green and white paper?
Renee:Yes. That was almost any corporate entity was doing a general ledger on a dot matrix printer had the green and white paper. So it was like lines that you can say every four lines, every four lines, every four lines.
Marc:But it never lined up with the stupid lines. Never.
Renee:Never. Not once. Nobody cared. Nobody cared for that to actually really work. Anyway, it didn't need to look pretty. It just needed to be good, right, I guess.
Marc:But, you know, the other use case there was the carbon copy. You know, if you needed three copies, so you had the really thick paper, white and the pink and the yellow or, you know, whatever. And because the needle would hit the, you know, the pin would hit the ink so hard, it would go through that plus the next two copies on those carbon papers. And I mean, I guess that's cheaper than printing it three times, maybe.
Renee:I don't know. It doesn't take as long. I think that's all it comes down to. It doesn't take as long, right? And the other thing was like, yeah, and you know, if I were doing any work with the accounting team, like you got the pink bunch, right? Right. And the pink bunch were the last bunch because the actual analyst needed the yellow bunch and the actual finance guy needed the white bunch. And so like you end up with the pink bunch and the pink bunch is barely legible.
Marc:So you can't read it. You can't read it. Yeah, it's horrible. Yeah, I think, you know,
Renee:That multi-part. Just for those of you who have never seen carbon paper, let's just get it out of the way, right? It's paper that has, I guess it's just like, what, it's like carbon in between, right? So if you write on the top one, because the pressure is so deep, you can see the carbon on the second page, the third page, and occasionally the fourth page. So before people like Marc made it credit card stuff online easier for all of us, you used to go to a store. They would run it through a credit card machine and they would write on it and you would sign it. And it was and they would tear the carbons out of the inside. Right. And then they would give you your copy. They would keep their copy and another copy would go to the bank. And that's how that stuff used to work. So carbon copy. I know you see it on your email now. That was physically a thing. It's more than one copy, even though we wrote it once.
Marc:Carbon copy. That was, that was a big deal. I think there is also that, that scenario when you had to print a big giant, I had to do this once at a place long, long ago, but we didn't have a printer that would actually print the thing that we needed to, you know, needed to print and then distribute. And so we had to send it to someplace.
Renee:They had to put it in the queue and then it would go to wherever that printer was and it would print out and then he'd ship it to you overnight that's.
Marc:How crazy the big printer
Renee:Yeah the big printer yeah.
Marc:So tell me have you ever seen
Renee:Yeah yeah have you ever seen like so the first commercial laser printer was who of course ibm right because of course they would be pushing the envelope on laser printers and it could print a hundred pages a minute that's.
Marc:Crazy a minute
Renee:That's what it says that's yeah crazy that's crazy. Wow. That's a lot.
Marc:It is a lot.
Renee:Couldn't afford it, though. It was IBM in the 1970s. It probably cost $30,000.$30 million, probably, right? Because it was a laser printer. It probably cost an arm and a leg.
Marc:Well, and you probably had to have the plug-in for the mainframe in order to do it.
Renee:Oh, you guys, let's talk about it. The evolution from inkjet to laser printers. By the 1990s, printers got a major glow up. Enter the inkjet and the laser printer. Faster, quieter, and way sharper. Inkjet gave us color photos, or at least the cartridges that dried up overnight, and laser printers became the gold standard for speed and crisp text. But here's the thing. These were still working on the same old principle, putting inker toner into paper. It was a refinement, not a revolution, right? They subtracted material one page at a time instead of rethinking what printing could mean, right?
Marc:Yeah, definitely. So this is... I've, when we first met, how many years ago, almost 30 years ago now, I had been working in it as a field, you know, a field person, and I worked on a lot of printers. I worked on dot matrix, worked on lasers and stuff. We did a lot of laser printers and inkjet as well. One place I worked at, we had this Epson, the, gosh, 700. I think it was an Epson 720 or something like that. And it printed beautiful, beautiful pictures. But it was the slowest thing in the world. It was so, it took forever and ever. But, yeah, those were great, you know, great workhorse printers, the HPs, the 2s and the 3s and the 4s. I think I even had a certification to work on the HP 4s.
Renee:I thought laser printing is kind of, it kind of did for printing what YouTube did for cable access television. It was like, it gave a production value to what you did at your desk that you didn't have before. Like that paper came out looking like it was the New York Times. Right. It didn't come out looking like it was, you know, it had perforated edges and fuzzy. It wasn't like that anymore. Right. And I thought like that to me, it was the aesthetic of it all that a laser printer gave you. And then I worked at an ad agency and there was a there was a machine in the ad in the ad agency. Right. And it sat by itself and you had to ask permission to use it because every print you did from this thing cost thirty five dollars. But it was a GE graphics printer.
Marc:Oh, right.
Renee:Unbelievable quality on that thing. But it was $30 a page to print it. I mean, the color was unbelievable. How shiny or matte it was on the page, you could decide. Still today, I think back to what we were all using, which in those days was a Mac 2, right? It was the Mac that was still attached inside the big rock cinder block thing. That's what we were using. Like in that same era, we were using machines like that. They were just cost prohibitive for normal people. Then even to some extent, it was cost prohibitive to an ad agency even because not everybody could actually use it. You did it for like finished client work. Yeah.
Marc:They were expensive, right? I mean, an HP 2 or a 3, you know, when they were brand new, they were probably a thousand bucks, if not more from what I remember. So only if you were, and I worked with the Hollywood crowds, right, you know, writers and directors and producers and all that, unless you were a successful writer, you didn't have a.
Renee:Like Seth Rogen gets one now.
Marc:Right. You didn't have a printer or laser printer of your own. You had an inkjet printer, worked on tons of those. And even the inkjet little doohickeys, the inkjet cartridges, I remember when I was at university— My wife had an HP DeskJet or something, whatever the inkjet line was, and she would hide the ink cartridges because her roommate would print, use her printer. You don't understand.
Renee:Turner was like 200 bucks. That's no joke.
Marc:Those stupid little ink cartridges, they don't last very long.
Renee:They do not.
Marc:And then they cost you $30, $40, $50. So, you know, and if you got to print, oh, gosh, I got to print my term paper and turn it in. And, of course, you're a college student and you wait to the last minute. And then all of a sudden you find out that, you know, nameless roommate. You don't have no printer ink. Yeah, you don't have ink. Oh, man. Disaster. Disaster.
Renee:You don't even know it until the print's job done because that's when you go back and look at it and you realize pages 13 to 46 are not even there. You're just like, oh.
Marc:Come on. Or it has lines through them. It's all wonky, wonky print.
Renee:Laserjet printers were, networked laserjet printers, were a huge security threat. Like, huge. You want to hack somebody? Hack the printer. You'll get everywhere you want to go, right? Like, that's how scary that stuff was. We didn't take that seriously enough back then.
Marc:Yeah, we definitely didn't. And I do remember this quite a lot. And it's because of the cost of the printers, right? If people needed to print and you had a floor of cubicles, why would you give a printer to every single person? There's no reason to do that. So you'd set up these printers in strategic places on a floor. And, you know, then you people would select their printer out of their little print queue thing and print away. But that meant that on these desktop networks, these flat networks, this network device was living out there in the IP world. And if you weren't careful, that IP could get exposed because of the way that the print protocols and the way that network design would work in the olden days. It's possible that those ports would be exposed in ways that you wouldn't want. And, you know, they're embedded systems, embedded systems in the 90s. You're thinking about how security models would look on those embedded systems. And it's completely different than it would be on a PC. They're open by design because people needed to print. And how do you print? You open a port, squirt your print job at it, and, you know, away it goes. And then the command structure that you would exploit these things in order to, you know, take control of them. Yeah. And you could use them for all sorts of different things. The famous, I don't know if you want to tell the story, you want me to tell stories.
Renee:You can tell the story. I don't know it. I'm hearing it for the first time. I didn't know this happened.
Marc:Yeah. Everybody knows what Rickrolling is, right? You get Rickrolled. Never going to give you. Yeah. Never going to let you down. So everybody just got Rick rolled by them to status your podcast. But basically, you know, the, all, all five listeners, Back in about 2015, 2016, just tons and tons of printers get compromised, and people send out the lyrics to the infamous Rick Astley song. So it's Rick rolling at massive scale on thousands and thousands, like around 100,000 unsecured printers.
Renee:Uh yeah it's right that's annoying and sort of funny but what happens when they're doing it and you can't stop them the only thing you can do is unplug your printers and walk away right like i can imagine like just printing page after page after page of yes just in like and you're just they're chewing through your laser printer like crazy and it's gonna break like three years before it's supposed to like there's a lot of damage you can do with that sometimes i think i'm a criminal mastermind because like i just go right there like how else could i jack that up like good thing i I'm not having a real skill. I might actually be able to do things like that. All right, we're moving on to 3D printing, the additive revolution. You like this stuff. 3D printing, I feel like, but you like it. So, okay. Then in the 2000s, something genuinely radical appeared, 3D printing, called also additive manufacturing. Traditional printers that lay ink on a page, 3D printers add material layer by layer to build up an object. It's less like a printer and more like a robot glue gun with a PhD. That's a good way to put it. At first, the tech lived in labs and industrial plants, car makers, aerospace companies. They used 3D printing for prototype parts that would have taken weeks or months with traditional machining. But over time, smaller, cheaper machines landed in homes, schools, and maker spaces. suddenly the idea that you could design something and then just print it into existence from your desk was no longer sci-fi. And I think that when I think about this, I think back to, I got to do work with. A large tractor manufacturer. And their concern was when they move over to manufacturing all their parts from 3D printers, right? And the material they're using is metal and they're going to figure out how to make this happen. But they're worried that there'll be an entire gray market and all they need to do is be breached, right? Because now it's a file. If it's a file now and what, and you, the manufacturer on the other side, I'm the manufacturer that owns the tractor. You're the manufacturer who makes parts for that tractor. What we're exchanging is not actually anything other than data, right? And so when we send that data back and forth, if that's compromised in any way, you have an entire gray market that can print that just as well as anybody else, China, and they can do whatever they want with it, China, and they can collapse your whole market, China, especially if that's what you do. You make parts for the gray market. Enter China, right? So I feel like this is the, like, if you talk about risk management, and that's pretty much all I talk about all day long anyway. Like, that's the risk to me. Once this stuff turns digital, now I'm at the mercy of cyber attacks. I'm at the mercy of, you know, cyber espionage and everything else in order to deflate my market or cripple it entirely.
Marc:It is a little scary. I see that kind of on a more personal level because I don't have a 3D printer, you know, but I know lots of people who do, right? I, you know... It's one of those, I don't have a, but I know somebody that does.
Renee:I know people who do.
Marc:In the hobby kind of, I'm a nerd. I build scale models. I build little Japanese robots and weird, you know, miniature figures and all that sort of stuff and paint them and have fun with that. But that's, it's huge, huge. And the modeling and hobbyist movements, just, you know, people get, because you get them so cheap. Yeah. You know, not just SLA, but, you know, any type of deposition-based printing, you can get really pretty inexpensively and print really high-quality scale models or parts or add-on things. But the thing that people worry about constantly is exactly that. Well, what happens when my file gets into the wild? Then, you know, then you have a whole DRM thing. Should I institute some sort of, you know, a limited use file system? Should I just let it go free and hope that I get compensated for the work that I do? Because these models are not, they're not simple, you know? Yeah. They can be quite complicated. They're very detailed. So if you think about it from an artist's perspective, if that artist built something, they want to get compensated for that. Well, and if their model is selling the file, then what happens when the file is easily available?
Renee:Right. I can just share it with anybody I want, and all of a sudden, we all have broken bags, right? Like, that's how that works.
Marc:Yeah. I think that's – it's really – You have to rely on the trust of people quite a lot, right, to trust that they're going to do the right thing. And I don't know, you know, we know that that's not always the best.
Renee:Trust is not a control.
Marc:Trust is not a control.
Renee:Let's just put it out there. It's not a control. Let's talk to me about some of your favorite use cases, though. What are some of your favorite use cases of 3D printing right now?
Marc:Trust but verify. I think the and there are these subtractive 3D printing as well. But I don't think that they're not really in the hands of consumers. So they're not usually seen as much, but there's subtractive, like you take a block and you use a, you know, well, think about, uh, What do they call the stupid tables? Oh, gosh. Now I totally blanked. It's the woodworking.
Renee:It's okay. You can edit this.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Renee:You can blank all you want. We can sit here for 10 minutes while you figure it out. Yeah.
Marc:No, in woodworking, right, you have a file and you put the device on it. It's like a router and it grinds out the thing, right? It subtracts the wood and then you have something. Right, okay. You know, I'm totally blanking on this. But there's lots of these sort of subtractive things. stone, metal, you know, a lathe is a way, in a way, you know, a subtractive 3D printing. But these additive mechanisms are really cool. And like you think about it, you say, oh, I would never use that. Oh, I would never use that. But then you go, oh, wait, oh, the handle on my drawer broke off and I don't know where to get the new handle, you know, thing. And I design it in CAD, I print it, and I paint it to match the...
Renee:It makes that sound so easy. I design it in CAD. Like there's full degrees around how to use CAD.
Marc:Or you know what? Or I just buy the file from somebody,
Renee:Right? You go to a catalog, you buy the file, you download it, you print it.
Marc:We're back to the eternal catalog, right?
Renee:That's right.
Marc:We didn't talk about that. But I think that's a pretty neat use case. The use case of building your own parts, and some of the 3D printer manufacturers do this today. I think Bamboo or Ender does this, where in order to complete the assembly of your rig, you have to print the parts to do it, which is kind of cool. I mean, why wouldn't you, right? You have the filament, you have the printer, you set it up, you run it, and you can build better supports or you can build new types of rails or, or whatever. I think that's kind of cool. The one that I think is, it's, it's like, it's just mind blowing, right? Because. You have somebody that's orbiting the earth. They're in a space station. Yeah. They're flying around. Oh no, I need something that I don't have. How do you get it to them? You can't.
Renee:There's no Amazon. There's no Amazon.
Marc:There's no Amazon. You can't ship it to them, you know, cheaply. So what do you do? You send them a file and they print it and they've got the tool. They've got the component. They've got whatever it is that they need in that particular scenario. I think that's really cool. I think that we're going to see more of these kinds of situations and use cases where I don't have the tool. I can print the tool. Like I was working on a tilling. I have a rototiller and I have to, you know, run on the thing and it pulls me along and all that. I have to get one connected to my tractor. I think that would be better. But I needed a particular sized socket for the thing. The stupid tiller had three or four different sized bolts. And I was like, I'm missing the one socket for the right size for that. I'd be like, I wish I could just print that. And then I would be ready to go. So certainly, you know, some of the materials probably wouldn't withstand the torque that you would need. But if you start looking at some of the technologies that are out there, it's not just plastics and resin. You're starting to be able to print liquid metal, right? Apple has a – they bought a company to do printing with metal. There's a stone, like these composite stone.
Renee:Funny you should say that because I have 3D printed parts from composite stone in my mouth.
Marc:In your mouth. Right.
Renee:So I had bridge work and replacement work done. So they've reconstructed my bottom bite with a bunch of implants and a bunch of different partials. But the crazy thing was, first they have to pull the teeth and then they have to put in the implants. And then once that's all done, and it's hard because you have to eat soft food for like six weeks, but once it's all done and it's healed, they're ready to go in and do that stuff. So they have you come in, they expose, because your gums grow over those things, they expose it all. And then they use LIDAR. And you're using the LIDAR in your mouth to map all the teeth on the top and all the space on the bottom and where those hooks are that they're going to put everything in. And so when you get your 3D printed teeth back, there's no reason to shape them because the bottom teeth match the top teeth because that's how it was printed. So, you know, you used to do that. They used to do like a thing and they would stick it on there and then it would be like tap, tap, tap, scrape, scrape, scrape, tap, tap, tap, scrape. No, it fit perfectly. It was the craziest thing. And to know that they were 3D printed, they like they just send off the file. Literally, they email a file to the lab. The lab sends them the stuff back and they email the file back and say, this is what we did. So all the teeth I have on my bottom, with the exception of the four in the front, all of them 3D printed.
Marc:Well, they look beautiful.
Renee:Oh, thank you. And I can chew meat. So that's all that counts. I don't choke in hotel rooms on stakes anymore. It's just an upside for Renee. She's not going to die choking while alone. It's good.
Marc:Well, and this concept of printing from different materials isn't new. I think this is something that's been around for a while. But, you know, it's just going to get better and better.
Renee:And when you can LIDAR scan someone's mouth, I think we're like, we've come a long way. We've come a long way.
Marc:Did you see, sorry, I just got my wife the AirPods because she was going to the gym and she didn't want to wear the over the ear thing. And I don't know what it does, but it asks you to scan your, you turn your head and it scans your ear so that it knows.
Renee:It does a lot of crazy stuff. Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, it does some really, really crazy stuff. But I think that kind of product, that to me is the home use case. I use my phone because the iphone has lidar in it now i use my phone to get really you know detailed scans of whatever it is i you know buy an ar something in the in the ar catalog that i just looked at and then print away and there there it is but i we're getting to the future let's go let's keep
Renee:Let's keep where we're at now let's talk about the future from plastic to So how did we get to the ear-splitting, from the ear-splitting clatter of dot-matric ribbons to the near-silent resin printers? Well, let's talk materials, shall we? Early 3D printers used mostly plastic filaments like PLA or ABS, basically spools of plastic fed into a heated nozzle, which then drew layers like a robotic hot glue gun. You know what? You'll even see like 3D printing pens. They're doing the same thing. It's just this thing that's heating up and you're stacking it to create something, right? Same thing, except that you're doing it with a file, right? Using a process called stereolithography. Oh, you see how I got that? I didn't even stumble. SLA. Lasers and projectors, pure liquid resin, one layer at a time. The result, smooth, whisper, quiet prints with insane levels of detail. I've seen this done lately on like on Instagram and stuff where people are making handbags, like solid handbags, like they're not meant to be cushy or anything like that. And they're doing it with resin printers and they're doing it with like like these. Yeah, it's crazy. They'll be like it'll look like this big egg and there'll be a thing in the middle that like where you can stick your arm in and carry it. And the handles are so smooth and beautiful and the edges are so pretty and the outside is so smooth. You're like, damn it, man, I can't believe that's plastic. And then they sell them. Unbelievable. They're handbags. I thought, you know what? If I were going to the Oscars, I'd carry that. It looked unbelievable. And it just happened to be plastic and printed. I don't see a problem with that. So, yeah, there's insane stuff going on out there. And SD folks are picking it up just as much as anybody else.
Marc:Wow. Well, the materials out there, in the SLA, the stereolithography space, There's a couple of different technologies, you know, how the light moves and all that stuff. Don't need to go into that. But the advancements that I see recently are in the types of resins that are being used. Some of them, you know, are more... Brittle, right? They're harder. Some of them are more rubberized and actually contain, you know, polymers and things that are more rubbery. So they have more flex and bend and that. And, you know, the variety of different types of resins that are used for different use cases, right? Like I wouldn't use a super hard, super brittle resin for your handbag. I would use something that has a little bit of give, you know, to manage impacts and things like that. And, you know, it's really interesting to see how that stuff is happening. I think that use case around the deposition, you know, SLA resin printers is, I'm not going to say it's limited because really, Like, what can your brain imagine to design in 3D in CAD and then you can print it? But it's a component approach, right? I have to build a component to marry it with some other component, right? If I want to print something in total plastic, that's totally fine. But if I wanted something with a leather strap or, you know, metal pins or, you know, wooden this or whatever, that's an integration process for me, which is how products are made anyways. But if you think about, you know, as a home consumer, I buy a kit, I hit the print, I put it together. And like you said, I've got, you know, a brand new whatever bag in, you know. Okay, there you go.
Renee:It can't be that bad of an idea, right? So in the future, Or, like, are we worried about not having... What's the future like for manufacturers? In your mind, the future of Toyota and its parts manufacturers, does this just become a data job? And now it's not full warehouses full of stuff. It's just files. Lots and lots and lots of files.
Marc:Yeah, I think somebody like a Toyota, right? You talked about a particular tractor manufacturer, right? These kinds of players, DRM does matter. Being secure with the files, it does matter. And if they aren't careful, right, they introduce gray market into the process.
Renee:And that's not- But one seriously does not exist. Like there should be no gray market for that. If you need a part from one of those providers, you call that provider and you get that part. You don't call, you know, I don't know, Pep Boys and all of a sudden you have that part, right?
Marc:Well, and, you know, Toyota doesn't, I won't say they don't, but Toyota, all the car manufacturers, They use OEMs, right, to produce whatever it is that they are producing.
Renee:Well, yeah, because you build cars in the country you sell them at, right? So, like, that makes perfect sense to me. Yeah.
Marc:Right. But it could get tricky, right? Like, you could really destroy an OEM supply chain market if you're not careful, right? And if all of a sudden, especially for plastic parts, plastic parts right now, you could easily replicate in a 3D printed environment at a home printer style. So if you build a printer farm, you have a small, medium-sized parts, you could absolutely, if you had a file, you could decimate that stuff. I mean, most of that stuff is done in injection molding today rather than 3D printed. But with the quality of the printing going up and things like on demand, right, you can't do injection molding on demand. Like you can, but it's a lot of work, right? You got to pull the dies off, clean them, change the assembly line, change the plastics. With a printer, it's like, oh, that's the design print now. And it's instantly available. So on demand, I think, is where that's going. But it still becomes a DRM issue, a cybersecurity issue, supply chain issues. What do you do if all of a sudden the most common plastic parts that one OEM totally depended upon, that was their number one selling product, and all of a sudden nobody needs to buy it anymore?
Renee:Right. That's it, right? Or someone messes with it, and now it's not exactly the right part, and then it breaks because someone, you know what I mean? Like, there's, again, I'm a criminal mastermind, and I just want you to, I just want to break stuff no matter what. You can keep your data. I'm just going to break it and put it back, right? Like, that's not okay. It's not okay either. Yeah, and I think, like, especially... Tractor company that we're talking about, they do business in mines in Africa, right? You know, if one of those big dump trucks, like one of those size of a building, like breaks, like you really do have to wait a while for a part, right? Like you do have to, and like now they can say, well, no, actually, we'll ship you that part, you print it, you know, we'll ship you the file, you print it, and we're good to go. Like, that's great, except that that file now exists somewhere in a mine in Africa. Like, you've got to really think about that stuff, right? All right. So you're a hobbyist. I'm a hobbyist. We do not have the same hobbies, which is good because I can't imagine doing models. I just can't. The glue alone would be too much for me. I would have stuff stuck in my eyebrows. It'd be all in my face. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.
Marc:Yeah, but you use a hot glue gun, I'm sure, right?
Renee:I don't. I don't. I do a lot of candle making, but I don't use. So I work with hot wax, right? But I don't want hot glue guns. Yeah, no. And then I crochet a lot. So it's, yeah. I'm a textile artist.
Marc:I thought with the candles that they would like when you're putting components together. But I guess it's just wax.
Renee:No, it's just wax. You melt it on a hot plate a little bit and stick it to something. And then it dries. There you go. If anything, you're using a, you cool it with that stuff in the can that makes it really cool really fast. The canned air. That's how you get it to get really solid really fast. But yeah, no, it's all wax. And then certain wax takes certain, I can't talk about this forever, but certain wax takes certain points at which they melt. And then, you know, some of them get bubbles. Some of them don't. There's whole kinds of stuff in there. But no, I don't use any of that. But I do work in wax. And there is a way to build 3D stuff in wax with a wick that'll burn all the way around the outside of it.
Marc:That's cool. I've seen that.
Renee:I have to figure out how to do it in a pastry bag and then I'm off and running. I want to figure it out.
Marc:That would be cool.
Renee:So when consumer-grade 3D printers hit the market, hobbyists went nuts. For a few hundred bucks, you could suddenly print toys. Tools, cosplay armor, you name it. I remember people doing Star Wars a lot. So Stormtrooper helmets, you could see those a lot. Yeah, you'd see a lot of people 3D printing their Darth Vader helmet front and back. It was a helmet, right? I saw a lot of that going on the last few years. Makers turned their garages into mini factories, but it didn't stop at hobbies. Medicine jumped on board. Surgeons use 3D printing for custom prosthetics, dental implants. I have those. even scaffolds for bioprinting tissue right architects can now print scale models of buildings or entire walls the power goes from idea to object has never been more accessible someone like me could now have an idea about what i would want my house to look like do a 3d rendering take it to a contractor and have them laugh at me out loud like i can do that now I can do that now.
Marc:What's that? What's that page? McMansion. McMansion Hell.
Renee:Yeah, McMansion Hell. Is it still out there? Because it's really good. If you guys have never seen it, audience, if you're listening, if you've never gone to McMansion Hell, go check it out. She goes and finds that. She's an architecture major. She goes and finds the worst houses and explains to you why they're so bad.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:And she did Betsy DeVos' house once.
Marc:It's bad. Oh, yeah. I bet. It's sad. Whatever. Yeah, now you can print out whatever you're. But you just want to live in a trailer. You don't want to live in a McMansion. You want to live in a trailer.
Renee:I want to print a tiny home and move right on in.
Marc:Well, look, that's a use case, I think, right there. Like, what's the scenario for printing a tiny home?
Renee:Or can I print my own RV? Like, there's a ton of stuff you could do with my own travel van. Can I 3D print it? Why not, right?
Marc:As the materials get better, the big limitation right now is that materials are... They're brittle or they're not very load bearing right but it's their components like what happens if you buy a frame and then print all the components to to build onto the frame right right it and this is this is just an extension of the sears house and you know yeah in a crate in a shipping container right yep they're going to give you the plans they'll give you the materials and then you go and you build it. And I think that that's where this, and it may not be at scale of houses, but it might be the scale of furniture. We've seen 3D printed furniture. We've seen 3D printed printers, Seen 3D printed componentry, all of this stuff. So I think it's going to get, I think it's going to get bigger. I think certainly the medicine use case, that's a pretty, that's a pretty interesting one. And yeah, I mean, you mentioned the hobbyist stuff. That's just crazy. I mean, the very first thing that I thought about for buying a 3D printer for was when one of the kids that was building, my art student, she had to build a carousel or she decided to build a carousel and a small, tiny carousel. And she was putting some surreal animals on it. And she wanted to actually move. And she designed the gearing system in Fusion 360 and everything, but we didn't have a 3D printer to print. I was like, well, that's like the use case right there. You just built the gears in CAD. Yeah. You know, what do you do next? And instead I helped her build it out of plastic, you know, just sheets of plastic and stuff. But like that would have been the perfect use case. Literally, oh, I just designed it in CAD. I'm going to print it and go. Yeah, that's right. There you go. You know, for me, I don't know. I'm just not there yet. I don't want the smell and the mess.
Renee:So other than helping the artistic child, there's no other reason for you to have one of those? There's just no reason?
Marc:I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure. I mean, you know what? You probably find use cases for it and stuff, but I don't know.
Renee:I've been making all kinds. Every order of craziness.
Marc:What would you make?
Renee:Well, I'd start with podcast merch. I'd make nerdy, nerdy podcast merch. So if you happen to be a 3D printer manufacturer out there and you want someone to test drive that and talk about it later on a podcast, reach out. Marc, what's our email address worth? Can you reach out to us at?
Marc:Nostalgicnerdspodcast at gmail.com.
Renee:If you would like to send me one, I'd like to take it and talk about it at length. I would want to make jewelry, actually. That would be my thing. I would be one of making earrings. I'd want to make bracelets. I'd want to make beads for necklaces. I'd want to string them all. Yeah, I would have a really good time with just making, you know, 3D printed jewelry. Just tons of stuff. I'd have fun. That's cool.
Marc:Yeah. You know, 3D printed jewelry is like, not only do people do 3D printed jewelry, but jewelers use 3D printers to build casts and molds for jewelry.
Renee:To make jewelry. Yeah.
Marc:To make jewelry. Yeah. So they'll build their master, and then that master, then they'll cast, and then go through the whole process. There's material that's, you know, the lost wax method, right?
Renee:Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can pour it in there, and then you pour the metal in, and it takes up the space that the wax was in, but the stuff around it keeps it into place, and they pull it apart, and bam, it's done. So you don't—there's no forging it, really. And then they just polish it up really good. Yeah, I mean.
Marc:That's how— You can print that wax, essentially, for the lost wax. Yeah. I mean, that stuff's really cool. Every single... And I saw this, surprisingly, in the mall. Every single mall jewelry place that did custom jewelry had a 3D printer right there in the shop in the mall. That's crazy. And I was like, wow, man, that's nuts. Like, they're doing production right there in the mall.
Renee:Well, and they used to have to, you know, design that and then design it in the wax. So you had to be good at working with wax, too. Like, that's amazing right there. Like, that opens that kind of hobby up to somebody like me. I could go forge sterling silver jewelry now because I don't have to have any skill at all. I just need a 3D printer and some wax. So let's talk about the big leagues of 3D printing. So industrial 3D printing. The biggest impact is in heavy industry, right? Aerospace companies are printing jet engine parts. It's kind of scary. Automotive plants are making complex metal components that used to take entire supply chains to produce. And construction firms are literally printing houses with concrete-based materials, reducing waste and slashing costs. So we are using this in the industrial space, right? And it makes sense for all those use cases. And it makes sense that you could 3D print a house. But just so we're clear, like, it is just concrete being laid on top of concrete in a design that's being driven by software, right? That's all it's doing. it's it's literally working like a 3d printer only it's doing it with concrete hey by the way have you ever seen do they put rebar into that or is it just concrete layered on concrete and that's it's kind of like a wall is that is that how would they do it i don't know if i've ever seen rebar in that stuff i've.
Marc:Never seen i can't say that i've seen the whole process i've watched lots of videos on that yeah and looking at this this topic but i've not seen what the reinforcement technique is.
Renee:Yeah.
Marc:There has to be something, you know, and I think there's The clips and videos and stuff you see probably aren't the complete process, but I would imagine they're using glass fiber, PVC puff fiber, all that stuff that gets printed probably has a material in it that helps with rigidity and strength. They've got to be using some other type of reinforcement as well. I can't imagine they're not, but I don't know. Maybe I could be wrong. Maybe the concrete they're using is just so great that it doesn't, but it doesn't, I don't know.
Renee:So do we use it here in the United States? It has to be something. Are y'all using it there in the UK or is this something that just, you know, is still.
Marc:I haven't seen it here. I haven't seen, I haven't seen any 3D printed places here yet, but I know in the States I've seen some Walmart buildings that have been using it. I have seen some residential properties that have used it. So i know that they are they do exist and if they're in in the states i mean with concrete you have to you have to do reinforcement right so i'm sure they're using some sort of reinforcement structure around that so the the 3d printing rigs i'm sure have you know ways to to do that but it's literally it's the same concept as a as these filament printers you have a rig and the rig moves and it draws a line and it just the line is has a thickness and it just keeps stacking and you just stack and stack and stack. The biggest 3D printed office building was completed in 2019. It's in Dubai. So there are some scaled applications there. I think certainly for warehouses and square buildings and buildings you know, simple forms, why wouldn't you? I mean, that's, it's fast. It's easy. It's cheap. It's kind of like the, that expanding foam stuff. I don't know if you ever saw that stuff. That was pretty cool.
Renee:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Marc:They build the form. They, they mix the foam, they drop it in and it just goes, whoop. Yep. Yep. Fills up the, fills up the form, but you can't do super complicated structures that way. And then you've got some structural Yeah,
Renee:30-story buildings. Like, I could see how if you put in the rebar and you build in the structure, then just filling it all in with that is just fine. It would work the same way, right? And it has to be somehow better than just pouring it in sections, right? It obviously must be better than that. Otherwise, they would still be pouring it in sections, right? Yeah, I don't know. So, okay, let's look ahead into the future of 3D printing. So what's next? Well, grossly enough, multimaterial printing where one machine can combine metals, plastic, and even living cells into a single build. Researchers are pushing toward printing organs, a holy grail of medicine. Imagine bypassing transplant wait lists by printing a kidney on demand. I mean, that is the holy grail, right? If we could do that, we would never have an organ shortage again. We could start with some stem cells, we could turn them into kidney cells, and bam, we grow a kidney.
Marc:Yeah. Well, have you seen the artificial meat companies? They print, they basically print this slurry of meat.
Renee:That turns into something that seems like meat. Yeah, I have seen that. It's called a McRib. And I love them. They're really good. I think you should eat a lot of them.
Marc:I know you love the McRib, but yeah.
Renee:Yoga mats never tasted so good. That's how I look at that.
Marc:Well, I bet you, companies like McDonald's, they've got to be thinking about that, right?
Renee:Right, right.
Marc:3D print sandwich. Yeah. I mean, the McRib, the McRib is, if it's not already 3D printed, I mean.
Renee:It is a ripe candidate for it, right? Because it's got those stupid little rib ridges in it. Like it might have bones in it, but it really doesn't. Yeah, you're right. It's perfect for that. Can't do that at Arby's. You can only do that with the McRib. I'm just going to put it out there.
Marc:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the Arby's gray marbled beef would be more complicated than the McRib. It would be. Or a McNugget. I mean.
Renee:If you can grow a kidney, you can grow a McNugget. I'm just going to put it out there. You could probably do it.
Marc:Absolutely. Absolutely.
Renee:You're also headed to space. I totally agree. Astronauts on Mars won't wait for Amazon Prime deliveries from Earth as much as Jeff Bezos would love for them to do that. They'll just print what they need from tools to replacement spacecraft parts. It's a Star Trek's replicator, like inching into reality. And I think that's totally true. We're living Star Trek, dude. It's Star Trek 11 again.
Marc:So we talked about volumetric printing right before we started recording. And this is, this feels like the replicator, right? This volumetric printing, you've got this vat of material. Liquid material vat and you use a laser array to shine lasers, spread your lasers into this vat. And because of the way that the lasers are arranged and the way that things are heated, it goes from there's nothing there to all of a sudden instantly there's something because the laser matrix essentially cures the resin inside this volumetric container instantly. That's that's some cool stuff right there that is i
Renee:Put that right up there with like theoretical theoretical physics for me because it's like i don't understand theoretical physics either and i don't understand how a vat when you throw some stuff at it it heats up in the right places and it heats up a lot of like if you want an empty space in that in that part that you're building you want an empty space in it they just it the laser just gets really hot in there that stuff just evaporates and bam it's square with a hole in the middle and you're like what in the hell just happened like it it really is amazing technology but i don't understand how any of it works i mean i get it but i don't get it.
Marc:Yeah i i get it you know the concept but like i don't get how you know this these lasers you know get the depth you know perfectly right and
Renee:It's temperature right because it's it's evaporating whatever that stuff is and it's leaving behind yes what it wants it to look like right it's so it's actually it's doing the negative stuff it's taking stuff out right and it's saying here's what's left and this is what you told me you wanted and here's what's left i think the create because i saw when i looked it up because we talked about before we got on here and i looked it up on in a research paper and it showed you kind of what the model looks like which is just a file. Then it showed you what it was doing inside that vat. And inside that vat, like if you looked at what it started with and what it ended up with, the sections, if you looked at it with thermal, the sections that were hottest were the ones that weren't there when it was done. Right. So like it just, it evaporates it. Like I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that thing. I wouldn't want to know anything about it. Seems like super dangerous to me. I don't know. But if it could make a kidney, I'd be all for it. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. Yeah.
Marc:I mean, certainly the volumetric stuff is resin based now, but, you know, I've got to figure that just like with other resin based technologies, they're going to think they're going to experiment with the types of resins and the material properties of that. But I think that's really cool. But, you know, that Star Trek Replicator is... I mean, when did Next Generation show? Was that... Because the first SLA printer shows up in 1984. So which comes first, right? Star Trek Replicator and Star Trek Next Generation or the 3D printer? Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to look that up.
Renee:Yeah, I thought Next Generation was... I mean, we would watch that at, I didn't. I was forced to when we were at cooking.com. So what is that? 1998?
Marc:Yeah. So it had to be later, right? So 3D printers show up. But I think that's a kind of interesting scenario. Certainly somebody on, well, did they have replicators in the 60s show?
Renee:I don't know. Yeah, they did. Remember everybody had, they would just go in and like order food and it would be there. You did have a replicator, right? Yeah. In the very first one, you did. And it seemed crazy in the 60s. Like, that's a crazy thought. It is a crazy thought. Yeah, to think that we sit here now saying there's a real possibility with the right kind of biotechnical engineering, we can grow a kidney. And that would be a relief to the people who go through dialysis or have chronic kidney disease or hereditary kidney disease. You know, people die in their 40s and 50s because of that. If we could fix that, that would be amazing. And then other people don't have to walk around with one less kidney. and you don't have to wait for, you know, there is no more waiting list, right? There's no need to do that. If you don't reject it, there's no need to do another one. So we're good, right? Like, and you can grow it yourself from your own tissue, from your other kidney, right? Like, I don't see why any of that's bad.
Marc:We should be working towards that. I think we should definitely be working towards that. Like maybe printing eyes, you know, somebody couldn't see.
Renee:At least a better lens. Print an eye.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:Implanted into my eye, right?
Marc:Well, okay, so I have seen some research papers that talk about printing lenses. Because you know how people will donate, obviously, after they die.
Renee:After they're died, yeah. Live organ donation will chase you down and pull out your eyeballs. Like, you donated this. Well, not yet. I didn't mean right now. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, yeah, they take out your cornea.
Marc:Yeah, they take out the lens and then put it in somebody else's eye. Yeah. I mean, that stuff is real. If you think about printing... New lens for somebody. I mean, that's, I know, I've seen the research on that. That's pretty cool.
Renee:That's amazing. So yeah, I think, but all technology has a downside, but like right now, I feel like, you know, if you could, and I guess 3D print an organ probably isn't the right way to talk about that. If you could create that from artificial means into an organic thing, like that's an amazing thing. And then pretty soon we're printing potatoes and then we don't me to grow food. From the clattering ribbons of dot matrix printers to the whisper quiet precision of resin-based 3D printing, the journey has been nothing short of incredible. Additive manufacturing hasn't just improved printing, it's redefined it entirely. So Marc, thanks for this. This was fun. Thanks for tuning into the Nostalgic Nerds podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and hit us up on social media. We want to know, do you remember using a dot matrix printer? Seriously, come commiserate with us because we remember and what's the coolest or weirdest thing you've ever seen done in 3d printed so drop us a note and we'll share the favorites on our next episode thanks Marc all right thanks.
